With a new, gleaming skyscraper and a shiny nouveau NBA arena that looks like giant art perched near the Milwaukee River, downtown Milwaukee and its surrounding area is in the throes of a construction boom. Yet no local jobs are harder to fill than industrial positions like welders, plumbers and electricians.

Helping to fill this skills gap is WRTP/BIG STEP, a Milwaukee nonprofit that connects under-employed and under-served people to sustaining jobs in the region, most of them in the construction and manufacturing industries. Founded in the late 1990s to replenish the region’s industrial base, WRTP/BIG STEP offers many tutoring and training programs for adults to connect them with sustaining careers while beefing up the region’s industrial workforce. Its youth outreach includes in-school programming in Milwaukee Public Schools and other districts, and Operation High Expectations!, which matches people without a high school diploma ages 18 through 24 with an employer for paid work experience.

“We do a lot of career exploration and summer academies for young folks who don’t graduate from high school or who lack the proficiency of skills,” says Mark Kessenich, president and CEO of WRTP/BIG STEP. “Especially over the past five years we’ve been engaged with helping disconnected young people find that way toward the construction industry as the demographics shift and the baby boomers start retiring.”

One such person is Malik Williams, who at 17 wanted to change his life for the better. “I had to work to pay rent, was always trying to make ends meet,” he says. Laboring in restaurants and doing other odd jobs most of the day didn’t allow him to show up to high school like he should have. “They kicked me out,” he says.

His dream was to become an operating engineer like his grandfather had been, but obtaining a high school diploma and the licenses necessary to jumpstart the career path seemed impossible. But then a friend referred him to WRTP/BIG STEP where Williams enrolled in its Multi-Craft Core Curriculum (MC3) High School Equivalency Diploma (HSED) program, a 16-week course that provides folks with construction industry skills and a high school equivalency diploma simultaneously. Instructors from WRTP/BIG STEP’s partner Literacy Services of Wisconsin teach classroom reading, writing and math instruction while workers from the construction industry offer real-life training, often on shop room floors. Plus, WRTP/BIG STEP helps students find part-time work to fill in the gaps while they’re finishing up courses.

“It’s killing two birds with one stone: A high school diploma toward earning credits which automatically links you to a whole range of apprentice programs,” says Kessenich. “And at this juncture in the economy, especially in the greater Milwaukee area, there’s no better job to be jumping into than a construction apprentice program. The market is very hot.”

After learning things like how math applies to construction work—measuring walls and using geometry to figure out how much paint he would need to buy to cover the walls—Malik Williams graduated from the MC3/HSED course in December. Now he’s studying for the skills test that, once passed, will enable him to apply for an apprenticeship to operate machinery like backhoes, cranes and excavators. “As long as you’re determined and you’re ambitious about where you want to be, all you have to do is follow what [the instructors] tell you,” he says. “They can take you wherever you want to go.”

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